The Devil's Dream: Waking Up (7 page)

* * *

H
enry sat on 'his' bed
. If Brand broke in here and really looked at this place, he would be able to tell that everything was put in place about ten minutes before Henry arrived. The pieces just didn't fit together, especially in Victor's room. A large television sat against the wall with an X-Box attached to it, but the TV stand held three games. Here he had this huge set up, with a lot of money invested—from the looks of it, to game—but yet only three games purchased. Two posters hung from the walls, one next to his bed and one on the back of the door. One showed a band Henry didn't know and the other a picture of the X-Men character Wolverine. Comics and bands. They might go together for someone, somewhere, but for the majority of teens? No. Especially not at eighteen years old. By this point, he would have chosen one or the other.

Henry would just need to hope that when Brand came, he stayed in the living room or at least didn't look around too hard, because this set up would make Henry's sell that much harder to believe.

He pulled out his cell phone, unable to turn it on now.

"We shut your phone down,"
Brayden had told him.
"The number, everything. If anyone dials it, they'll get your voicemail, but that's all. We can't risk Brand somehow getting a trace on that phone and figuring out who you are. Take this new one. You can only call two numbers, mine and Jake's."

The new phone sat on his dresser, but he hadn't used it.

School tomorrow, he supposed.

Maybe things remained boring and they shut the whole thing down in a week. He could go back to his old life, and his family wouldn't have to worry about this anymore.

M
atthew looked
down at the boy. He couldn’t see much, but he could make out the kid's face. Everyone looked peaceful when they slept, looked like death except for the slight movement of their chest up and down. Sleep was the closest thing to peace a human could find on this side of the grave. For a few hours each day, the world and everything in it stopped mattering. One could die in their sleep and not worry about it for a single second. Matthew, right now, could put a knife through this boy's temple and he would die looking serene.

The FBI hadn't tried to hide Victor, not that it would matter if they did. Matthew found his residence easily enough a few minutes after hanging up the phone and then started his drive. It took him around fifteen hours to get here, but he'd done similar drives over and over, so it didn't bother him. He came immediately because he had no time to waste; things were...deteriorating. He needed to figure this part out fast, in order to decide what came next.

He saw the two FBI agents sitting in the car outside. He couldn't see inside the car but he knew what they were. That was strange in itself: one car, alone here. The back door had been an easy enough pick, and he slipped in as silently as he had the other houses he took from. He crept from room to room, looking for the kid he now stood above. He found the parents in another room, looking as peaceful as Victor. Everyone at peace in the house, and the FBI agents outside, if not at peace, then certainly not in turmoil. Why hadn't they put someone out back? They already made that mistake last time and they paid pretty dearly for it. Or rather, Joe Welch and his family paid dearly for it. So why do it again?

Allison Moore made the mistake last time. Art hadn't. So was this Art's mistake? Had he not given enough attention to Moore's tactics to learn from them? It was possible. The man wasn't necessarily slow but there were plenty of faster fish in the sea. Or was Matthew making the mistake? That was the other possibility, and from there, Matthew saw two more sprout out like roots from a tuber. If Art didn’t make the mistake, if he put a single car out there on purpose, then it meant they wanted him to come here, to take Victor. Either because they thought Victor could convince him to stop or because Victor wasn't Victor. Victor was someone else, some staged FBI agent acting like Matthew's long lost son.

If Art didn’t make the mistake, and the safe bet was to assume he didn’t, what choices did that leave Matthew with? He could walk away from this right now and concentrate on holding his mind together and collecting the remaining bodies. And maybe doing that was the smart move because things were cracking quickly inside him. He knew Morgant had woken up, briefly, but that still meant he pushed Matthew aside. He saw where Morgant tried to wreck his work, saw the ripped up feet on the people he tried to rip from their spots. Blood had leaked down to the concrete floor from the torn flesh and Matthew mopped it up, wondering how long Morgant had been loose. Wondering how much more time Morgant would need to pull someone off. Matthew didn't know the answer, but he knew that he would find out pretty quickly if he didn't do
something
. So leaving now, just going out the same way he came in, was a solid idea.

But if this was his son. If Rally and he created this child, then he couldn't leave him here. He couldn't walk away and leave him only knowing what the television told him about his father. He couldn't leave him and go back to building a damn death ray. He couldn't kill the last of his kin without at least knowing him, without knowing whether this kid could absolve the rest of the world's sins. Maybe he could let everyone live if this was his son; Matthew felt he deserved that. What was wrong with that?

If the kid
wasn't
Brand's son, but an impostor...well, did he want to leave him here on this bed if that was the case? If Art and Jake and this Victor collaborated to invent a scheme to fool Matthew, then did the impostor deserve to live? Did he deserve to go on with his life after having used the only thing that could possibly matter to Matthew, the only thing that he thirsted for through the past three decades—a son? No. If this was a scheme, then the schemers would die. Art and Jake when the world ended, and this kid? In a much more painful fashion.

* * *

M
aybe the wrecked
streets woke Henry, or maybe whatever concoction Brand used to put him under finally wore off, but either way, his eyes opened and he looked out a windshield into blackness illuminated only by the van's two headlights. He turned his head slowly, his neck muscles feeling more like rusty metal than live flesh. A large black man sat two feet from him, in the driver's seat—Henry recognized him as Arthur Morgant. Henry closed his eyes hard and held them there for a full five seconds before looking back at the man. No, not Arthur Morgant. The man driving the car was Matthew Brand. A man inside a man, that's what he was and—

Jesus Christ, get it together.

If his neck felt rusty, then his head felt like an engine with no oil, unable to fully understand the world around him. He was in a van, naked, with his hands taped down to the arm-rests. Taped down heavy. His feet were taped together, all the way from the toes to the top of his ankles. He couldn't move. He glanced around the van, his head moving slowly, and saw it appeared older—like something a construction crew might use. No CD player, just a radio that showed the time in bright green lights.

Three in the morning.

I've been taken.

The thought revealed itself to Henry like the burning bush to Moses, illuminating everything, and at the same, made it so that he focused on nothing else.
I've been taken
. Kidnapped. Stolen. And he was naked, meaning…oh, Dear God, meaning the tracking devices were useless. He looked back to Brand, his brain finally grasping what was happening. He wasn't at home, wasn't even at his fake home. He was with a madman, strapped to the seat with enough tape to hold down a mule.

He's going to come for you
. That's what Art told him. Everything had been to prepare him for this moment; the entire crash course of Victor's life, the constant reminder of what was coming, all of it leading here, to this criminal in this van. Henry lowered his head, closed his eyes, and tried to gather himself, to find his center in this hazy world he had woken in.

"Matthew?" He asked as he opened his eyes, staring out the front window.

"Yes, that's my name," Brand answered. "And you're supposed to be Victor Trust, right?"

Henry kept his mind on his breathing, kept the breaths coming in and out at regular, slow intervals. "Yeah, Vick. What are you going to do with me?"

Matthew didn't take his eyes off the road. "We're going to talk. Drive and talk. I need to know if you're my son and if you are, we'll talk some more. If you're not, you'll die."

"How are you going to know if I'm your son?"

"I haven't quite figured that out yet, to be honest with you, Vick. Taking us both to a DNA testing clinic isn't going to work, as I don't think they're going to allow me to wait for the results without calling the authorities. I'm hoping that our discussion here can lend some credence, one way or the other."

Henry knew everything about Victor Trust. His entire history, all of it made up, but every single detail inside his brain and things were coming to life up there now. The oil finally flowing down to the pistons; the dull slowness of his first few waking moments passing. "How am I supposed to know if I'm your son? The cops told me I was, that's it. It's not like I have any documents proving I'm your wife's kid. My parents said they adopted me, but that they never met the mother. That's all I know."

"How long have you known you were adopted?"

"Maybe three days," Henry answered.

A few seconds of silence passed between them.

"Are you frightened?"

How should he answer that? He was a trained FBI agent, not an actor, and so breaking down and crying in a situation like this wasn't his modus operandi. He trained for this purpose, for situations in which he no longer controlled whether he lived or died. Yet he wasn't Henry, he was Vick, an eighteen-year-old kid taken from his bed and thrust into some strange van.

He could find the answer needed, though. He could find a way to the place that this question demanded; most days, hell, nearly every single day, Henry avoided it. He'd walked in on his father's heart attack. Not his mother. Not his brother. Him. He'd walked into the room and known from the first second he saw his dad that the man would never get up again. His eyes were wide open, so goddamn wide. They looked like tiny moons sitting in the caverns of his head, his constricting pupils resembling craters. The skin on his face wasn't his father's; it was the skin of a dead person. Like his body knew what came next and was already taking the necessary steps to ensure sure everything went as planned. His face was pale, his heart unable to push blood even that far. His face seemed to sink in, like maybe his skull disappeared and large blue veins tried to replace it. Those veins stuck up every which way, crisscrossing his face like cracks on a sidewalk. His hands grasped his chest and he wheezed out each breath in long, struggling gasps. Henry had stopped and stared, shocked at the sight, not even able to feel fear at that point—but then the seizure took hold. Fear set in plenty after that. The hands that clutched his father's chest suddenly started to twitch, and then his arms flattened against the floor and his whole body did the jitter-bug. His mouth snapped open and closed as a mixture of foam and blood spilled over his lips. His legs kicked, and his fingers twitched like he was the fastest piano player in the history of the world. Henry rushed across the room, dropping to his knees, and started trying to wipe away the foam spilling down his father's face. He couldn't get it all though; it sprang from some endless well inside his dad. He remembered thinking:
which part of the body makes foam? Is this how they make foam at those parties?
It was a crazy thought, something without any rational basis, but then again his father doing a full body tap dance at forty-five years old didn't either. Henry screamed out to the rest of the house, to the rest of the world, but no one heard him. He and his father were alone, and by the time an ambulance showed up, his father's body was already cooling.

Henry didn't think about that anymore. He used to, a lot, when he was graduating high school and starting his undergraduate studies, but he had made himself stop. He couldn't think about it. He couldn't see his dad like that because all the panic and fear would come back, that and a sadness which didn't know he needed it to end.

"Yeah, I'm fucking scared," Henry said as a tear slipped from his eye. His voice shook and inside his head he saw those blue-green veins eating up his father's smooth skin. "I'm taped down in a van next to the most wanted man in the world. Wouldn't you be scared?"

"I suppose I would be, if I were you. I'm not though."

"You're not taped to a goddamn seat, either." Henry couldn't reach up to wipe the tears away so he just let them fall, dripping down his neck and falling from his chin.

"Vick, how am I supposed to determine you are who you say you are? I've done some checking, and your background is clear as water, but that would be easy for someone like Art to do. Your parents, they're the exact same. Social security numbers, driver's licenses, the whole bit. But that's not enough for me."

"I don't care! How am I supposed to know what is enough for you? What are you expecting me to do when you figure out that I'm your son? Are you expecting me to wrap my arms around you and give you a hug? YOU JUST FUCKING KIDNAPPED ME!" Henry screamed at the front window; his own veins now raging against the flesh on his neck.

"One thing at a time, Vick. We can't leap forward to next steps when we haven't even taken our first one."

Henry listened as the blinker snapped on and then watched Brand pull the van over to the side of the road. He had no idea where they were, but the road was empty and the world dark.

Brand took his seat belt off and then turned so that most of his body faced Henry.

"Don't say anything," Brand whispered.